Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday February 26, 2012 @10:30AM
from the never-said-boo-about-the-human-implanted-chips dept.

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from the Wall Street Journal: "The Supreme Court's recent ruling overturning the warrantless use of GPS tracking devices has caused a 'sea change' inside the U.S. Justice Department, according to FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann. Mr. Weissmann, speaking at a University of San Francisco conference called 'Big Brother in the 21st Century' on Friday, said that the court ruling prompted the FBI to turn off about 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were in use. These devices were often stuck underneath cars to track the movements of the car owners. In U.S. v. Jones, the Supreme Court ruled that using a device to track a car owner without a search warrant violated the law. After the ruling, the FBI had a problem collecting the devices that it had turned off, Mr. Weissmann said. In some cases, he said, the FBI sought court orders to obtain permission to turn the devices on briefly – only in order to locate and retrieve them."

It is subject to the terms of Part 95 of the FCC rules. You don't need an individual operator or station license (as you do for amateur radio), but there ARE legal limitations on what you can do over a CB.

One of the limitations is exactly what types of signals can be emitted over the CB channels. You are limited to AM or SSB voice. Digital data packets (such as from an APRS system) are NOT permitted.

No kidding. The fact that they are having trouble locating them is troubling...is that to say they don't even know basic information on the suspect, such as his address or common residence? A means of contacting him/her?

I'm also wondering if you could get in trouble for taking the device. If someone intentionally places something in or on your car, to me that is akin to giving it to you. Just like if someone intentionally leaves a box on my doorstep I assume it's for me. Am I supposed to ask the owner of pamphlets permission before throwing them away?

Maybe if they put a bounty on them, $50 dollars no questions asked, or $500 if it's still in working condition.

Hmmm, maybe the working condition bounty should be higher, I know a lot of people that would think $450 they don't yet have is a small price for showing scum exactly what they think of them. Remember, not only is this an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, it is also a declaration of war by the instigator (personal war, not literal war), and an insinuation that you are a vile criminal. Let's just say people don't like being insulted like that and without a large cash mollification, your expensive tracking toy will quickly become random junk.

Are you suggesting that federal agencies should somehow be required to admit to people that they have been illegally tracked? Such knowledge would only confuse and upset people. Far better to break the law one last time in order to covertly retrieve their hardware.

Absolutly! Additionally, all intelligence or evidence should be considered as fruit of the poison tree, including any information derived from the "poison". Therefore inadmissible in court.
They should also be liable for civil rights damages.

Personally, I'm wondering about any convictions made on cases where there were warrantless GPS trackers installed. Wouldn't this give their attorneys grounds for immediate appeal/instant overturning the conviction?

Of course, if these trackers never showed up in the evidence presented, I'd think it'd be awful hard to get the FBI to admit those trackers were in place. Getting the government to admit anything is a stone cold bitch.

If the FBI showed up on my door and asked for their tracking device back, I'd say, "I don't know who you are, whether you own it, or whether you have a legal right to get it. Send me a letter giving me all the details and establishing that you own it, and I'll take it to a lawyer and do what he says."

Suppose an hour later another bunch of guys showed up and said that they were the FBI and they wanted their tracking device back?

If the FBI showed up on my door and asked for their tracking device back, I'd say, "I don't know who you are, whether you own it, or whether you have a legal right to get it. Send me a letter giving me all the details and establishing that you own it, and I'll take it to a lawyer and do what he says."

Suppose an hour later another bunch of guys showed up and said that they were the FBI and they wanted their tracking device back?

I doubt they'd ask. They'd just remove it when the vehicle was accessible. Perhaps parked in your driveway instead of the garage, or in the parking lot at your work. They certainly felt no compulsion to ask when the put it their, possibly trespassing when they did it.

If they are just on a fishing expedition, they'll probably assume that the device has failed/fallen off into a drainage ditch/whatever and call it a day.

If they are actually interested in you, it is quite likely that the same fine upstanding men with guns who installed the device will, shall we say, 'schedule a service call' at whatever place and time seems most likely based on tracking data from before you discovered the device...

If it has come to the point where you have a GPS bug on your car, they'v

What would happen if I happened to find such a device on my car and put a fine metallic mesh grounded to the chassis of the vehicle? They would have a serious problem, I guess...

What would happen if you didn't put a mesh around it to more securely affix it to the undercarriage and it came off on the highway, bounced into my windshield and caused a massive crash and multi-vehicle pile up?

You would be ill advised to not secure such loose, or merely magnetically attached devices.

Yeah, but in some places this will only convince the bombsquad to blow up your car to 'neutralize' the device, and then charge you all attendant costs. Especially in Boston. It's much cheaper to buy a new car, and either send that one to the scrapyard or donate it to charity. Please note, if you really think it's a bomb, donating it to charity is definitely and act of EVIL, and usually illegal as well.:)

My first reaction to this was "Why wouldn't they just let them die off when their batteries run down?" In my experience, no GPS device small enough to be hidden in a car will run more than a few days without recharging the battery; most of them die in a matter of hours.

Then my second thought was "How are those gadgets powered?" Do they have a a humongous battery that will last weeks or months? Do they tap into the car's electrical system and not need a battery? If so, will the owner of the car find that the battery is run down when they don't drive it every day? What would be the legal import of the cops tapping into my car's battery and draining it? And, of course, when I took it into the shop and they found the electrical parasite, it would be removed, so this doesn't seem to be a very smart way to power a secret GPS gadget.

You could use a solar charger, but those are sorta hard to conceal.

Anyone know how these things are powered, and how long they can run without either draining the car's battery or dying because their own battery is dead?

To be honest, if they were illegally tracking you in the first place I don't think they'd worry about the juice it was sucking from the battery.

They wouldn't care because they are just nice, warmhearted, all-around good guys; but they probably would want to avoid doing things that make you more likely to go poking into your car trying to figure out why you needed to break out the jumper cables... That would raise the odds of you discovering the thing.

I suspect that if they hook it up to a vehicle with 24V electrics when they expect it to be 12V (like, oh, certain Landrovers and some of the more "interesting" bodywork conversions) then they may find their GPS doesn't work so well any more.

Yup. I remember discovering that the earth cable had come loose in my old Volvo, when lots of very odd stuff was happening. Measuring the bus voltage when the headlights went really bright showed it had gone up to nearly 20V...

they burn a teeeeny tiny amount of electricity in standby - think like a a wrist watch - it can use a tiny battery for years. They only start burning juice when their accelerometer kicks in when the car moves. It then asks where it is (GPS co-ordinates) phones those in and then every (x) seconds repeats that -
Box to GPS: "Where Am I?"
GPS to Box:(X.Y.)
Box: [send X.Y. to bigbrother@fbi.gov]
In between, it's "on" but only needs to transmit every (x) seconds, and even then, not for very long. Transmitting is the big energy burner. The really good ones can last over a month assuming the car is used about an hour every day. They go back to "sleep" mode after about 5 minutes of motionlessness.
You can buy them yourself. The good one cost about $200 - 300 and you have to pay for access to the data to be sent to you and/or access to the mashup where the data is plotted on Google maps. Don't ask why I know about this stuff...

You can buy them yourself. The good one cost about $200 - 300 and you have to pay for access to the data to be sent to you and/or access to the mashup where the data is plotted on Google maps. Don't ask why I know about this stuff...

You can buy them yourself. The good one cost about $200 - 300 and you have to pay for access to the data to be sent to you and/or access to the mashup where the data is plotted on Google maps. Don't ask why I know about this stuff...

Why do you know about this stuff?

Progressive offers to 'give' you one as well as a 'discount' on your insurance policy if you sign up for that 'service'. It plugs into your black box port. If you drive the legal speed limit, it might help reduce your insurance rates. In my ca

You can buy them yourself. The good one cost about $200 - 300 and you have to pay for access to the data to be sent to you and/or access to the mashup where the data is plotted on Google maps. Don't ask why I know about this stuff...

Why do you know about this stuff?

That's my automatic reaction when someone tells me not to ask them something. I get an answer more often than not.

I have to say that I have my doubts about this description, especially the comparison to the commercially-available versions. The device that was found by one guy under his car...apparently, an earlier model with its own power source...bears no resemblance at all to what you or I could easily acquire without going to a defense contractor-like organization. So it tends to follow that any device that would improve upon that design would only divert further from what could be bought for a few hundred dollars

FYI, GPS does not work this way at all. Signals are unidirectional - they are *only* sent from the satellites to the receivers. The data stream sent is primarily a very, very accurate timestamp as well as ephemeris data (indicating the orbit of the satellite). Based on that information, distance to each satellite is calculated by the receiver via speed of light delays and triangulation (this is why 3 satellites are required for position, and 4 are required for al

I think that you are thinking too "Mission Impossible" here where the agent rolls under the car at a stop light and puts a magnetized tracker on the underside of the car. These devices are actually hard wired into the vehicles battery system so that they charge when the vehicle is on. The FBI wouldn't waste time tracking someone with a battery powered device that would go dead and then they would have to find them again to plant a new device.

How can they actually fit this without gaining access to the vehicle, or causing the body management ECU to report all kinds of faults because of the additional current drain?

Its not difficult to find a running light circuit and clip into that. But sometimes they do clip into the wrong lead and antics ensue. I've heard of one being found where the device was tapped on to the low fuel sensor circuit of a vehicle, resulting in the low fuel warning light coming on whenever the GPS went into charge mode.

We have car alarms, but they're mostly used by self-centered pricks who don't notice or care that the alarm is being set off by the wind or passing trucks every 5-50 minutes, so no one else pays attention to them either.

We do have CCTV, but not so much as in Orwell's United Kingdom. There are actually entire city blocks which are not under any kind of surveillance at all!

Sounds like the UK, where *entire cities* have no CCTV. The whole "eleventy billion CCTV cameras" was made up by a tabloid journalist, but I can't be bothered recounting the sad tale again. Suffice it to say that the second most violent city in the UK, with a population of about 2.5 million people in the whole conurbation, has about 200 CCTV cameras in total - mostly concentrated in the city centre and around the football grounds. Old Firm games are notorious for violence between rival fans.

Please return the other GPS that is attached in the vicinity of the right wheel well. (You may have to get down on the ground to access it.) This happens to be the property of the Federal Government. We have enclosed a box with an address so that you may drop it off within the next ten days at the nearest mailbox at your convenience. No questions will be asked. Thank you in afvance for your cooperation.

This will prevent us from coming to retrieve the aforementioned property in person. In the middle of the night, no less.

I am more than happy to comply. I have enclosed the object I located stuck to the bottom of my truck in the vicinity of the right wheel well. Although I am no expert and I don't really know what this GPS object of which you speak looks like, here it is. On my ranch, we have different names for these, depending on whether they are dried or still soft.

The summary is inaccurate when it says Jones required a warrant. The Court only found that the installation of the GPS device was a search because it involved a trespass. It did not say whether that search was unreasonable or, if it is, whether a search warrant or probable cause were required.

In fact, reading the opinions, it would appear that all the justices (except maybe Sottomayor) would allow GPS devices installed without a warrant for short term tracking.

If an average citizen would be convicted of a crime (trespassing, harrassment, stalking, etc.) for doing it, the police need a warrant if they want to do it. I mean, for fuck's sake, they have special courts made specifically for the purposes of rubber-stamping warrants, now these fucking assholes feel like they should be able to spy on us without even having to go through the trouble of getting the bullshit warrant in the first place? What a Fucking Bunch of Idiots.

Agreed.Should I mention the time I ran into an actual FBI agent in a store getting 'print samples' from various laser and dot matrix printers?He was really upset when I pointed out that they don't have physical type like a typewriter, instead they are all electronic fonts that can be changed on the whim of the user or software.He got even more upset when I pointed out that all the inks and toners came from a handful of factories, and with refils, it might not even be the same one that was originally used.He

I recently set up an entire GPS platform for our fleet at work. Security was an issue so I purchased the platform and run it in house on a server I built. Currently have 200 assets, but the platform will handle 5000.

They are probably using a device similar to an Enfora modem. These are cellular only, and fairly basic, although they can be configured to reports certain parameters such as ignition on, motion detection, geofencing, etc.

At the other end of the scale you can have a dual band device like the i50B

I've collected a few hundred of these now-deactivated GPS tracking devices, and I'm coming here to Slashdot to ask: How can I repurpose them into something useful? Can I install some flavor of Linux on them? Perhaps turn them into nodes of a mobile mesh network? Mobile hotspots for on-the-road internet access? How about a location-specific personal music player, that based on where you're driving, will download appropriate music and feed it to your car stereo's built-in Bluetooth receiver?

Hard to tell, the article is light on details. That's one possible interpretation. Here's another: there were actually much more than 3000 warrant-less trackers out there. After they lost the case, the FBI tried to get warrants for all the existing trackers. Most of those requests were granted, like they usually are, and the 3000 are the ones where they were denied.

After they lost the case, the FBI tried to get warrants for all the existing trackers. Most of those requests were granted, like they usually are, and the 3000 are the ones where they were denied.

I don't think that would help them. If you read the opinion of the Court carefully, you'll see that in the case decided, there was a warrant issued, but the tracking device was installed one day after the warrant expired and was installed in a different state than that for which the warrant was supposed to apply. I don't think retroactive warrants could be issued, and since the majority in the case found it was the trespassing act of installing the device which triggered the Fourth Amendment problem, I do

And how many agents do they have? For that matter, do you really think we have THREE THOUSAND terrorists in our country? Or how about this, 3000 THAT WE KNOW ABOUT?

Neither do I. So who the hell are they tracking, and why? That's a lot of law enforcement abuse of powers there, probably 3000 cases of it. Want to guess how many decades that would take to go through court if you tried to prosecute all of them? (Yeah, we have a lot of courts around the country, but those cases would be clustered in just a few.)

3000 is a small percentage of the total populace, it however is not a small quantity of abuses of power.

For that matter, do you really think we have THREE THOUSAND terrorists in our country?

Not to defend the warrant-less trackers but do you really think the FBI only monitors and investigates suspected terrorists? They also deal with any crime that happens on Federal lands, crimes that cross state lines such as kidnappings, murders, thefts, and much more. They aren't all there just to fuck with our freedoms, you know. Yes, some members of law enforcement are power hungry assholes. That's not all of them, however, and you do a dis-service to the good ones when you forget it or trivialize what they actually do.

It's rare that I'll, you know, defend the government and all... but the FBI's purview extends way beyond terrorists. They handle organized crime in general, for one. I mean, the South American gangs like MS13 alone could account for a large portion of those GPS trackers. That doesn't even consider all of the other crime that they handle (bank robbery, wire fraud, etc.)

And clearly they haven't got enough for a warrant. Seeing as how it takes so little to get a warrant that they have no reluctance to ask for one to retrieve 500 worth of property. Apparently a crime on par with petty theft is enough to get you tracked.

Since these were all illegal, why not force them to reveal to the tracked parties their tracking activities and ask for the devices back. They may face legal action, but so what? The supreme co

Personally, what I'd love to know is whether the FBI was being lazy with those 3,000(if we can do it with or without a court order, why go to the judge?) or whether they had 3,000 active bugs for investigations so flimsy that they couldn't find a judge to sign...

The former wouldn't be good, but would be unsurprising and fairly banal. Doing paperwork when you don't have to is a fairly rare psychological disorder, after all. The latter, on the other hand, would be 'uncomfortably retro' behavior on the FBI's part, hearkening back to their historically loose adherence to petty matters of law and due process.

My guess is the former is the main reason. Why go to the court for something you don't need to go to the court for? Indeed, if you genuinely believed that there was no need to get court approval for something, it'd be positively irresponsible to keep going to court about it- a big waste of expensive court time.

But then, there's no saying how many of the investigations are too flimsy to have stood up in court. That's exactly why we force law enforcement to get warrants for things- to weed out flimsy cases. W

How many were stuck on rusty pickups at the local truckstop in the hopes it would magically be a bandito of some kind?(If you don't do the proper investigation and don't have probable cause, then anything you do is either fishing for clues or making wishes to the magic instant case fairy.)

My guess is the former is the main reason. Why go to the court for something you don't need to go to the court for? Indeed, if you genuinely believed that there was no need to get court approval for something, it'd be positively irresponsible to keep going to court about it- a big waste of expensive court time.

But then, there's no saying how many of the investigations are too flimsy to have stood up in court. That's exactly why we force law enforcement to get warrants for things- to weed out flimsy cases. Without that check in place, god knows how many shoddy cases were nodded through.

if the 3000 cases weren't flimsy, they could easily get a warrant on them. that they'd need a "rollback" warrant on their own actions(to retrieve the devices..) directly implies that those 3000 cases wouldn't have gotten warrants for the surveillance.

It would almost have to be the latter. Otherwise they would just go get the warrants now rather than turn them off. Or at most, they would get a warrant and turn them back on then rather than seeking permission to turn them on just long enough to retrieve them.

There may be plenty of the former as well not counted amongst the 3000.

"The Supreme Court's recent ruling overturning the warrantless use of GPS tracking devices has caused a 'sea change' inside the U.S. Justice Department, according to FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann.

Or, Mr. Weissmann, you and the FBI could have just picked up a copy of the Constitution. Even a cursory reading of the 4th Amendment would have told the FBI that affixing a GPS device to someone's vehicle without even the nicety of having paid a judge a visit was eventually going to get the lot of you in a legal pickle and likely mean the Supreme Court would toss it out.

I recommend the FBI get a copy of the Constitution. It's available at your local library, at many bookstores. Hell, there's got to be a hundred thousand websites out there that have the full text.

It may not be so much a question of the FBIs Literacy as the Supreme Courts (mis) interpretation and (skewed) analysis of the Constitution. http://www.gpoaccess.gov/constitution/browse.html [gpoaccess.gov] has recent official propaganda from SCOTUS.

I think a lot of your questions on the subject will get answered there.

GPS tracking devices are radio controlled. The device still has power when it is "off" only the Global Positioning transmitter is off and it can be turned back on at any point by sending a command to the device. In layman's terms it is kind of like a cellular "phone" which is technically a radio. Even when your ringer is off you can still receive calls you just can't hear them in which case they go to voice mail (by default), or any other number/service you have decided to reprogram the device to send to.

Its probably much simpler than you imagine.They probably never did turn them off, they simply stopped recording the incoming location data. I seriously doubt they would build in a function to stop tracking in a tracking device.

These things don't have a gps transmitter. All they have is a cellular data radio that transmits long/lat info and an id number.

Which then in turn raises a serious question - we've seen hackers prosecuted and jailed for their activities, but what kind of punishment can we expect for those responsible for the violation of Jones's Fourth Amendment rights? My money is on "none". The SCOTUS ruling doesn't mean anything at all without some kind of consequences for those responsible, as there's nothing to keep the guilty parties from willfully doing it again. And I'm not talking about some stupid fine or something that means nothing to the individual agents that made the decision to violate his civil rights. I'm talking about jail time for those who placed the devices, and their supervisors who signed off on it.

That still doesn't change the fact that they've broken the law and violated the public trust. Simply having the evidence excluded doesn't seem to be very much of a deterrent. Law enforcement really needs to have the fear of God instilled in them when they do crap like this.

Clearly they have too much money if they have the time and manpower to track 3000 people.

The only time and manpower involved was placing it on the car in the first place.

From then its all done by computers.Most of these cases are probably drug related, and the investigating agent simple wants an alert if the car goes near some other known distribution point or any unusual places. This takes s almost zero manpower, which I suspect is why it was done in the first place